04 Mar How to create cartoon characters in Illustrator

It’s time to write a tutorial on vector mascot design in Illustrator In this post I’ll explain the process I followed at the time of designing Twisted Monkey cartoon character in vector format.

Ingredients :

Paper and pencil.

Scanner.

Photoshop.

Illustrator.

Basic concepts of Photoshop and Illustrator.

A lot of patience.

Optional : wacom tablet.

Briefing

The Briefing is a series of key questions to assist you in understanding the company and its requirements. Nonetheless, it can be done in a more or less formal way.

In this case we’re going to design a character for a horror movies producer. The requirement was a monkey as the mascot logo, the catch being that it was not to be your typical nice monkey. So we came up with the idea of making its clothes include a straight jacket and for it to have a knife with blood… lots of blood! It had to look nice, yet intriguing at the same time.

Traditional Drawing and Photoshop Retouches

I always advice you to start any design the traditional way, with a paper and pencil, especially if it’s an illustration. As good as your Wacom tablet may be, it’ll never be as accurate as a conventional pencil.

Traditional drawing on the left, photoshop retouches on the right.

The image at the left is my pencil sketch, I start drawing with a red pencil, and when I’m satisfied with the results I remark the lines with a graphite pencil. As you may notice, it is more of a sketch than a finished drawing. Unfortunately my line quality isn’t as good as some comics professionals, no worries, we have Photoshop!

When I get something decent as a start point, I scan it to Photoshop and start to move things around, play with the facial expressions, the pose and various other elements of the design … until I get something I like (image below).

Evolution of the personality of our character 😛

Take a look at how the character evolves during the process. If you don’t have a very clear perception of what you want to do it’s always better to start with just about anything and then retouch it until you get what you’re looking for. And don’t get disheartened if you can’t get it at the first attempt, it’s common for such a thing to happen.

Cleaning and Inking in Photoshop

It’s critical to use a very high resolution (5000×5000 pixels) for several reasons :

It’s more comfortable to work with.

If later on in the process we decide to reduce the design, smaller mistakes wont be visible.

If the work is the same, preferably let’s do it at a higher resolution so it is print ready.

While vectorizing, the design would acquire accurate lines.

Cleaning with the digitizer tablet on the left, Inking with Photoshop on the right

Once we have a nice sketch for the mascot character, I start to clean the sketch in Photoshop with my Wacom tablet, assigning different line weights as I go on.

Final inking, it’s very important to modulate the lines correctly.

Notice we have 3 types of lines (take a look to the final inking below) :

Contour : thicker lines.

Borders : for instance, the inferior border of the jacket, medium thickness lines.

Internal lines : the lines that mark the cheek, they are the thinnest ones.

Transition lines : they start as the contour and then get in to the design. We start by making it thick and then thiner as it flows, as noticed on the line in the chin.

What we shouldn’t do :

Create shadows: we will do it in the color phase.

Create extremely thick lines without any variation in thickness.

Overload the design with internal lines: the purpose of these lines is to mark volume, you have to create them in a subtle way. It is meant to serve as a guide for when you color.

Draw straight lines : if you look closely, all the lines are slightly curved.

Have small areas: ensure that your volumes are as big as possible, otherwise you wont have sufficient space for the colors.

To get the final inking we have 2 options:

If your hand-drawn lines are not very good, you can ink the sketch with Photoshop’s vector tools.

If you have a Wacom tablet you can use the brush tool and ink manually.

Vectorizing in Illustrator

If you created your lineart with Photoshop vector tools you can open it directly in Illustrator and it will be completely etitable.

If you opted for the Photoshop Brush Tool, we can open the file in Illustrator and vectorize our bitmap lineart by using Image Trace, it’s quite straight forward. Here is a video where I explain how to do it.

After the vectorization you probably will need to clean your layers, the goal is having a black shape with lot of white shapes on top.

Asigning plain colors, gradient and volumes

Plain colors

Now we only have to fill each white area with the color we want, I usually use medium tones, not too dark or too light.

Adding gradients

Gradient colors

We will use gradients of at least two differentiable colors, but not extremely contrasting because we’ll add lights and shades later on. For now don’t pay too much attention to the gradient direction, we’re just choosing the color tones, later on we’ll orientate them to give coherence to the illumination.

Cutting the areas

The gradient areas are too big to get good illumination effects. So we have to cut these big areas in to smaller volumes with the knife tool.Learn how to do it here.

Gradient colors with the areas cut in to smaller volumes

Later we retouch the gradient colors to try to get a coherent illumination. There’s a basic thumb rule that’s very important : next to a dark color there’s always a light color.

Adding shadows and lights

We’ll create a layer and set its blend mode to Multiply. This way we have all the shadow vectors grouped together. IMPORTANT : if you make the shadows in the Normal blend mode you’ll have to adjust the vectors a lot so you don’t cover the black lines, this is why we use the Multiply blend mode. This mode makes the layer transparent on top of the black color.

Animation so you appreciate the shadows.

We simply pick a similar color (sometimes I use gradient colors as well) to the one in the background and we make small vectors to mark the areas in the shadows.

In this case it’s not essential to use different layer modes, although you can always use the Screen blend mode to get lighter tones. First I make a soft illumination and later on I add some strong light retouches in order to reinforce the contours.

Final Retouches

Now we only need to add blood in industrial quantities. For this I used the free Gomedia vectors (if you use them in your design do put a link back to their site, you have to be thankful right!). The blood is added in a layer above all the others, but below the right eye, in the Multiply blend mode.

Although I know that in such a complex tutorial I might have forgotten to explain quite a handful of concepts, if you do still somehow have any doubt just comment it, I’ll try to answer it as soon as I can and I’ll add it to the tutorial.

marcos

gladapple

This is wonderful. It’s always amazing to me when talented designers have enough time to give back like this, and help the newbies. I’ve always vectorized lines manually after cleaning them in photoshop, so thank you for making such a clear and helpful article.

Marcos

Didier

Hi, firt of all thks a lot for this tut it´s awesome and just what i been searching for !!!

I got a little problem after making of the silouhette. I made my path in photoshop, saved it as .tiff opened it in ilustrator made the silouhett with the same values and got my path vectorized but……i´ve a unique path and i can´t select any white area to start coloring.

Any idea of why? or how can i fix that?

Hop u could help me cuz otherwise i´ll have to colorate in photoshop and then i wouldn´t be able to resize it without losing resolution.

Tks for the answer, i let you my msn if u want to explain me directly:

Didier

Yeahhhh i was missing that the new layer group was a folder !! My bad is just i´m really new with ilustrator but i must learn don´t i? cuz it´s really important to us designers to resize images whiout losing resolution isn´t it?

well i continue with the coloring step, i hope i won´t get other problems otherwise i will need ur help loool!!!

tks again and i will send u my final result to prove u how good theather are u !!

Matt

Hi, I cant seem to get the white areas to appear, I think i have exported it correctly as a tif and with a white background. Yet after using the silhouette tool with what must be the right settings and even ungrouping the grouped layer I cant find any white areas, only my line art.

Very nice tutorial, I usually just do pencil work, then linework with black ink pen, then fix up linework in photoshop. Then color in photoshop, then add some effect on it.. I don’t know how to use illustrator properly, althought the work may seems like an illustrator work, if you zoom in close to my work.. there are lots of flaws and grains and everything.. pixelation too!:D

Davo

I am unable to see your images, I’m using a PC. I think I saw a post you made about some kind of viewer for psd and ai files? Why don’t you just take screen shots of the pictures and save those as jpegs so every one can view them? Or maybe it’s just my computer that won’t let me view your images.

k-mix graphics

respect…i’ve been searching for this kind of tutorial for ages…it has a lot of details,realy speeds you up,and since i just getting started with usage of illustrator(i,ve been working in photoshop for ages) it is really heplpful for a newbie like me…tnx,man!

Sergio Ordonez

Just like the shadows but using layers in screen and soft light mode. Everything is done in Illustrator but if you want my opinion I preffer using Photoshop though Illustrator is better for vector work.

Sometimes when you cut some marks appears, I dont think it will be too outstanding when resizing the image or printing but if you want to get rid of them just move the vertexs a little bit so the areas overlap. Anyway the key is working and working to get that naturality 🙂

arnold

“When I get something decent as a start point, I scan it to Photoshop and start to move things around, play with the facial expressions, the pose and various other elements of the design … until I get something I like (image below).”

I laughed out loud when I read this – I thought I was the only who did this! Nice to know I’m not alone.

eManT

I realize my ink in illustrator, i save it in tiff, and reopen with it. I made my line with Silouhette with same option than you, but i can’t put my color, how you do this ? It’s certainly very simple but i can’t do this 🙁

Thanks for your help, and gratz for your website and tutorials !

Sergio Ordonez

Hi Emant, did you check it´s not a compound path? Check on your layers, it ´s a compound shape you need to release it, select the shape and right click, then click on release. After that you have all the shapes ready to modify.

eManT

Lorenz

i love this tutorial and i want to try this one. It will help my lines to be converted in vector but i cannot download the SILHOUETTE because the site not available. Please help me where i can download Silhouette. thank you

Lorenz

Thank you for prompt response. I am using Illustrator CS but i think live trace is only available in higher version. Do you still have other file for “SilhouettePlugIn.aip” or download-able links? My friend told me that it works best and easy.Hope you can help. thank you

Preston Racette

Aviad

No matter what I do, the scissors tool doesn’t cut any shape into two, and when I use the gradient to shadow a shape it influences the entire originalshape because the scissors didn’t cut it. I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.

binay

I’d really appreciate it if you could tell me how much time do you spend for character design, inking and colorizing…it seems like hell lotta work. Just curious. That’d help me have patience with my work too 😀